Pity we didn't get one of those reversals/deconstructions that GoT is supposed to be famous for. Ramsey getting his throat ripped out with teeth would have been hilarious at popping the Bastardbowl hype.

The groping for the knife was too obvious though, being more coy at who would get the kill would have been better.

I'm interested to see how it's handled in the book a few years from now. I'd imagine it's the same basic idea, but I wonder if more context can improve it, because it was fairly emotional and then I had two or three major questions that did not help getting over how generally stupid it is.

I actually did really like the ending. As dumb as the idea was, the execution sold it.

The problem was everything leading up to it.

First of all, it just felt forced. "Welp, enough of this cave; we need to make something happen now."

Second, everything everyone did was dumb.

The Children have grenades, and are in a cave. None of them make any attempt to cause a cave-in. That's video game logic. You don't waste ammo shooting the walls because you know this game doesn't have destructible environments.

The White Walkers have a massive army of zombies -- so massive that they straight don't give a fuck if hundreds of them get incinerated -- and they send them all down the tunnels. Not one left up on the surface to look around and see if maybe there's another exit somewhere. This would have been perfectly fine in an ordinary zombie show (well, if the show had also previously established that the zombies had also been bitten by radioactive spiders), because superior numbers versus superior tactics is what the zombie genre is all about. But these zombies aren't supposed to be just mindless drones; they're supposed to be under the control of intelligent and malevolent beings.

If the goal here was some sort of reverse Spaceballs -- that the reason good will eventually triumph is that evil is dumb, and when the armies of the undead finally make it to the Wall they're all just going to shamble towards a chokepoint and shove at it -- then mission accomplished.

Ending scene spoilers:It was definitely a very emotional scene, but I hold by that once you get past that it's contrived and stupid. The two halves of the story weren't actually connected except for how the viewer was seeing them. If Bran had found himself stuck in the memory but aware of the danger and used past Wylis as a medium to control present Hodor or something that'd be different. But as it is it's a rare object hidden under a rafter in a 3rd person game, something that only makes sense if you're watching with a perspective that doesn't exist in-universe. I would give it more slack if I was expecting them to give details (and hopefully the books will) but I think that's pretty much the last we'll hear of it directly other than maybe Bran bringing it up next episode for a moment. If they do get into the reasoning behind it I'll be happily surprised.

That makes sense of how dumb the stuff leading up to it is though. The wolf, children everyone giving up their lives so easily wasn't because of stupid decisions, it was because of fate. Influencing the past and not seeing an immediate impact on the present world we know is one thing, but if our present timeline universe Hodor became Hodor from a paradoxical loop then it makes as much sense that the Three-eyed Raven and children had known for some time that Bran and what's-her-face would be the only survivors of that day and just didn't really care about the deets.

I definitely got the impression that Hodor had already become quite definitely Hodor at the time of the vision, judging by the huge scar on his head. If anything, he probably had and would be saying [b]nothing]/b] instead of Hodor without the intercession.

The books have definitely done a better job of setting it up. Bran being able to actually interact with events in the past was pretty abruptly introduced here, but it was an important component in Dance -- there's a brief scene where he sees his father through the heart tree at Winterfell, utters an exclamation, and Ned looks up like he heard it. That sets the table for a later and more important interaction, where he sees Reek crouching at the (same) heart tree (in the present), says "Theon," and that provides the tipping point where Theon musters the courage to take back his name and identity and try to do the right thing.

I think it could have worked pretty well on the show, but of course there are logistical issues to putting the set back up and bringing in the actors. As with many instances in the show, I can understand why they didn't do it but it feels like a missed opportunity.

The books have also spent more time on Bran warging into Hodor, and the sheer terror Hodor feels at it; the show established that too but it's been a long time since we saw it.

The natural, reasonable assumption as to why Hodor was terrified every time it happened is that, for God's sake, he's being mind-controlled and he doesn't understand what's going on; anybody would be upset by that, so why would we even question whether there was some sort of deeper reason? The best clues are the ones hidden in plain sight.

Anyway. Aside from all that...there's really nowhere Bran's story can go from here but to finally introduce Coldhands, right? I mean, it's pretty tough to see any other way out of the fix he's currently in.

(Or -- could he have already been introduced? Maybe that was him at the beginning of the episode. Or he could have been somewhere in the crowd scene where Bran ruined everything.

I still subscribe to the theory that Coldhands is Benjen Stark, but even if that's the case in the books it might not be on the show; after all, we haven't seen Benjen since season 1 and we barely saw him then. On the other hand, he rated a mention at the end of last season, and usually when the show reminds us of somebody we haven't seen in awhile it's for a reason.

Actually, has Benjen been in the Winterfell flashbacks? I suppose he probably has. I think we saw Brandon sparring with Ned, but Benjen seems like he should probably have been in there somewhere too.)

Given what happened to poor old Hodor, it's even possible that Bran causes the Mad King's madness.

Of course, eighteen generations of inbreeding are really more than enough to explain some mental defects, and Tyrion and Cersei as much as said a few seasons back that the Targaryens were about 50/50 between decent and horrible. (Math checks out given the Targaryens we know about.)

As it is, I think the morality (and efficacy) of Robert's Rebellion is already muddy and gray enough without adding any more complexity to it (aside, of course, from stating outright what a lot of us already assume, like Rhaegar and Lyanna's relationship being consensual rather than the abduction and rape Robert described it as way back in season 1).

To wit: the Mad King was a monster, but his son was not; it's possible that everything would have gone better if they'd just waited for him to die (or, say, quietly poisoned him and let Rhaegar assume the throne); the inciting event of the war (Rhaegar's abduction of Lyanna) was either a lie or a misunderstanding, but Aerys's response to the Starks' entreaties made the war inevitable; atrocities were committed on both sides, as tends to happen in war; Jaime Lannister's assassination of Aerys was cowardly and dishonorable and probably saved thousands of lives. And then Robert became a king who was presumably far worse than Rhaegar would have been, and raised (or failed to raise) an heir who was every bit as bad as the king he'd led a war to depose.

Throwing a(nother) causality loop in there would reinforce the theme of the messiness, futility, and pointlessness of war, but it'd feel like gilding the lily at this point.

zaratustra wrote:And I thought they'd slow down once they were off the books.

sei wrote:"Martin's never going to get here. Do what you want."

Bit of an oversimplification given that I'm counting four separate arcs that have doubled back two books. (Or three, I suppose, if you consider that the hints that the Hound was still alive were in Brienne's POV chapters.) And at this point I'm going to be pretty surprised if we don't get the ending of A Storm of Swords sometime in the next three weeks.